How to Sell your Images and Artwork Online
Artists in the period before the internet was developed would have found finding a large and open market for their work and time-consuming and frankly onerous task.
You would need to take your slides and artwork around with you in order to sell your images. It was a lot of leg-work, a laborious process which was often limited to within your country boundaries for the ordinary artist. Now with the the development and onset of the internet and then digital photography, many doors have opened up for more amateur and smaller professional outfits to market their photographs and artwork in a variety of ways.
There are two branches of stock photography which are particularly geared up for the internet. They are split into two areas, stock and micro-stock. The first represents the more traditional end of the market, Getty Images, Almay, Corbis all accept photographs from, mostly, professionals generally only in the RAW form and will hire out Rights Managed images to web designers and companies needing photographs and vectors for a reasonaly large amount. This is a good place to sell quirky and artistic one-off pieces.
Microstock on the other hand will accept photographs at the lower end of the scale, although this is increasing as the market becomes saturated. Microstock is a high-volume business selling cheap, conceptual images of seemingly mundane subjects shot extremely technically well. Websites such as Helium use them to illustrate the top of their articles, etc, and cannot afford to buy expensive stock images all the time. Microstock companies of repute include Shutterstock, I-Stock, Fotolia, BigstockPhoto, StockExpert and Dreamstime.
In addition, and this may be more useful for people who produce pictures of their artwork are the companies who sell end users greetings cards, prints and other images used mainly by individuals. These include companies such as photobox and also imagekind and also Photobox. As time goes on, these companies find increasinly interesting and different products to offer so it is always useful to keep looking for these.
In fact, there are probably numerous new websites that are being created all the time on the internet, and you have to do your research to look into ways in which you can market your work. You may choose to set up your own website. This is certainly a good option if you work solely in photography or art and have a large portfolio to sell. There are a number of companies that will do this for you and clickpics and sitewelder are particularly good for people with images to sell.
